…Similarly, it’s likely that the future of blogging — and the future spread of knowledge — will reflect the characteristics of whatever blog platform achieves dominance. Increasingly it appears that the winner will be WordPress. It first appeared seven years ago as a successor to software typically used for online diaries. Thus, it was originally text-based, but has since evolved to also encompass audio, video, and animation. It has even become a popular platform for entire websites as well as important components of prominent sites such as The New York Times.

(Emphasis mine).

Philip goes on to state:

In short, WordPress is not merely a blogging tool. It’s a platform that can lead to an explosion of new media properties capable of text, video, audio, music, animation, interactivity, online merchandising, podcasting, and even social networking. Successful innovations will rapidly take root and expand while unsuccessful ones will quickly perish or remain marginal.

… regular updates to give you an inside look at our vessels and their crews, describe the work on board and the observations being made by the scientific personnel. Beginning today the NOAA Ship Pisces, operated by the NOAA Office of Marine and Aviation Operations will report from the Gulf of Mexico. Stay tuned!

Recently they’ve been posting updates from the scientists at sea in the Gulf of Mexico. Those scientist are performing subsurface monitoring as part of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response.

NPR, in collaboration with 12 NPR member stations, announced the launch of a dozen topic-focused news sites today, marking the debut of NPR’s ARGO Network – a new online journalism venture created to produce in-depth, local coverage on subjects critical to communities and the nation.

Each ARGO site is anchored by a news-blog that features multiple stories each day, with an accompanying set of community features for audience engagement and curated content. The individual stations will decide how to integrate the ARGO site with their primary station websites.

Great summary over on computercourage.com, on the “Top 10 Reasons To Use WordPress.org For Your Website”:

4. The Visual Editor and CMS are Outstanding

The intuitive, user-friendly backend of WordPress is probably what made it so famous in the first place. I’ll never remember the relief I felt when I first installed WordPress after a few Drupal experiences. I always tell my clients, “if you can do it in Word, you can do it in WordPress.” In fact, with the Paste From Word tool, that statement is more true than you would imagine (this article was written in Word). WordPress is continually improving its CMS, adding features such as threaded comments, galleries, revision histories, trash, custom post types, and more. If you haven’t maintained a WordPress site yet, give it a look.

Very exciting news that invites to VaultPress — a subscription-based protection, security and backup service for WordPress blogs and sites — are now starting to be sent out.

Over the weekend we started to trickle out the first Golden Ticket invites to VaultPress. This means that if you’re on the list you now have a semi-random chance of being one of the first people who can sleep more soundly at night because of VaultPress.

If you’d like to move ahead in the line, write a blog post about why you want to use VaultPress and link it here, or tweet why you need your site protected by VaultPress and use the hash tag #vaultpress.

Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten.

Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.) Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation.

As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click, and blah blah blah just watch the video. (In HD, if you can, so you can catch the Easter eggs.)

Exciting news that Levi’s has just launched a new site, Pioneer Sessions, using WordPress to showcase “pioneering musicians from rock, pop, soul, and rap to re-craft the classic songs that inspired their sound”: